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How to Watch TV News

America is suffering from an information glut. Most Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it connects to anything else. Thus, Americans are rapidly becoming the least knowledgeable people in the industrial world. Author and academic Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers tell you how to become a discerning viewer.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, Postman chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it. According to Postman, technology is rapidly gaining sovereignty over social institutions and national life to become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. He warns that this will have radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, religion, family, education, and more.

The Disappearance of Childhood

This modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today, and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood. Deftly marshaling a vast array of research, Neil Postman suggests that childhood is a recent invention. But now the division between child and adult is eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into entertainment and pitches news and advertising at the intellectual level of 10-year-olds.

Jane Ord says:"Thoughtful and perceptive"

Publisher's Summary

Technology has a powerful capacity to affect the way we perceive the world and how it works. The authors and scientists in these interviews share their thoughts on computer-assisted communications technologies and the increasing capability of scientific technology to affect the world for good or ill. They also discuss the influence of cyberspace, virtual reality, and intelligent design. The interviewees include Neil Postman, Jane Metcalfe, Howard Rheingold, Mark Slouka, Andrew Kimbrell, Doug Groothius, Dean Kenyon, Philip Johnson, and Michael Behe.

I have been caught by surprise, as some of the participants in this program are reputable people (e.g. Neil Postman, Howard Rheingold) but the last part of it is a piece of not-so-subtle propaganda for intelligent design, with a bunch of advocates of this pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo posing as victims of the scientific establishment, just as Galileo was a victim of the Inquisition : this is a bit hard to swallow, considering that these people are closer in their orientation to the religious obscurantists who condemned Galileo than to Galileo himself.